Leonard Pitts, The Miami Herald
Posted 1/28/2002 12:00:00 AM

2001 Distinguished WritingAward for Commentary/Column Writing

Leonard Pitts of The Miami Herald

Flag of liesstill flies in face of truth — Jan. 20, 2000
Why lose yourself in group’s cause?
2nd thoughts following N.Y. verdict
Reparations’ weight still burdens soul of some black folks
Gangsta rap’s mask a rip-off
 

Flagof lies still flies in face of truth

Jan. 20, 2000

Masochist that I am, I thinkI’ll talk about the Confederate battle flag again.

Last time I did so, I arguedthat the state of South Carolina needs to remove that dirty symbol of slaveryand racism from its spot above the capitol building. Which, naturally, producedhowls of outrage, loads of racial invective and not a few lamentations for myignorance of history. As one writer put it, “If you are intelligent, and I thinkyou probably are, then you know the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.’’

Ahem.

If you know me, then youknow I can’t let that one pass unchallenged. Especially since it is repeatedad nauseum by apologists for the old Confederacy. The war wasn’t about slavery,they say, because only a fraction of the Confederate soldiers owned slaves.

It’s a nonsequitur masqueradingas logic. Put another way, I’d be willing to wager that the average Americansoldier had never even heard of Kuwait before George Bush ordered him or herto defend that desert kingdom. Because, you see, it’s not the soldiers who determinewhether or why a war is fought — it’s the leaders. In the case of the Confederacy,the leaders could hardly have been more explicit.

In an early message to hisCongress, Confederate President Jefferson Davis flatly cited the “labor of Africanslaves’’ as the reason for secession.

His vice president, AlexanderStephens, called slavery “the immediate cause ... of the present revolution.’’And he added this: “Our new government is founded upon ... the great truth thatthe Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to thesuperior race, is his natural and moral condition.’’

Not about slavery? Oh, please.

Yet, the attempt to separatethe Civil War from its dominant cause proceeds apace, without the barest hintof shame. Defenders of the Confederacy huddle behind euphemisms — “state’s rights,’’“economic issues’’ — but always, it devolves to the same thing, the bondageof African people. A century and a third later, much of the South still findsit impossible to face that truth squarely.

Instead, there’s this taxinginsistence that if grandfather fought bravely and truly believed in his cause,then surely this must transfigure the cause, must leave his deeds somehow ...ennobled. But that’s just another nonsequitur, another blind alley of logic.I mean, surely there were Nazi and Japanese soldiers who, during the SecondWorld War, fought bravely and truly believed in their cause. But who among uswould call their cause anything but reprehensible? Who among us finds honorin what they did?

WHITEWASH THE PAST

Indeed, some years back,when Japan issued school books that distorted or ignored that nation’s wartimeaggression and atrocities, American observers promptly condemned it as an attemptto whitewash the past.

Small wonder. The Japanesecan never be allowed to forget how awful that past was — else they might betempted to relive it.

What would we say to theGermans if they chose to fly the swastika above their capitol? How would wereply if they told us they were simply honoring the heritage of forbears whofought for what they believed? Would we call it a “controversy,’’ suggestingthere were competing opinions of roughly equal validity? Would we, in the mannerof certain rubber-spined presidential candidates, declare it a local issue ofno concern to “outsiders?’’ Or would we be alarmed? Would we say that here wasa people too deluded to learn the hard lessons of history?

SLAVES AS ‘SETTLERS’

And if that’s the case,then how can we say less about the South? How can we say less about the regionwhere, five years ago, a governor proposed educational standards that wouldhave required teachers to refer to slaves as “settlers?’’ Where in 1998, a schooldistrict rejected a black history poster because it included an image of a lynching?Where a banner symbolizing slavery and white supremacy flies above a house ofthe people?

Every day that sunrise findsit there, South Carolina shames itself, shames its ancestors, shames the nation,shames the very truth — and profanes the ideal of liberty and justice for all.

Yet there it hangs anyway,a cloth lie flapping in the Dixie breeze.

Look away, look away.

Copyright 2000 Miami Herald

Whylose yourself in group’s cause?

Compromising your individualityfor sake of belonging can be costly

Jan. 22, 2000 

Our question for today:How much of you belongs to you?

I’m moved to ask this byone of the students in my writing class. The assignment was to compose and readaloud an essay describing themselves and their lives. The piece this studentwrote was about how confusing and painful it is to have people pigeonhole youjust because you’re black. It’s difficult, wrote this 14-year-old, to have othersalways expect you to operate, be confined by, or bend your behavior to, theirexpectations.

 What was intriguingis that the people the child was complaining about were not white, but black.

 It seems my studentgets a lot of grief for speaking standard English, singing the songs of a whitepop group, and cultivating a rainbow coalition of friends. Some black folksin the kid’s immediate circle have responded with the harshest epithet theycan muster. They call the child ... “white.’’

If this were a movie, thisis the spot where you’d hear scary music and a shriek of unadulterated horror.

If you’re a member of aminority — racial, sexual, cultural, religious — there’s a good chance you alreadyunderstand what’s going on here. If not, I can only refer you back to that openingquestion: How much of you belongs to you? You may think the answer is self-evident.Truth is, it’s anything but.

The life of the Americanminority group is governed by a deceptively simple equation — oppression fromwithout creates cohesion from within. People who find themselves besieged becauseof their sexual orientation, skin color, culture, or way of approaching Godtend to draw together with similar others. They circle the wagons, raise thedrawbridge, close the gates, and make of themselves a community — a people.

It can be a soul-savingthing, belonging to a people. You love them unreservedly for providing you anemotional home, for instilling in you a sense of worth, for giving voice toyour aspirations. Most of all, you love them for standing up on your behalfwhen the world comes calling with reproach and accusation.

A soul-saving thing, yes.But you find, not infrequently, that you are expected to pay for this wonderfulgift at the cost of bits and pieces of your own individuality. When you belongto a people, when you are born into this association that exists on a basisof mutual defense, of watching the world from a bunker and waiting for the nextattack, it’s easy to lose your very self to them. So easy to become the group.

 Small wonder. Thegroup enforces its cohesion strictly. Its members are discouraged from doing,saying or thinking that which does not reflect the consensus of the whole. Sometimes,one is discouraged from even associating with members of the “enemy’’ camp.And there’s a heavy penalty for transgression: One is cast out, ostracized.

As in a colleague I oncehad who told me his people constantly criticized his work. Their complaint?He was “not Cuban enough.’’

It’s a charge that findsits echo across the American demographic. Not lesbian enough. Not Jewish enough.Not black enough. The unstated irony is that all these peoples who plead fortolerance of difference sometimes have so little tolerance for the differenceswithin their own ranks.

So sometimes, yes, a personwonders: How much of you belongs to you? Where’s the point beyond which fealtyto the group becomes a compromise of self?

I wish I’d had an easy answerfor my student but of course, I did not. I did tell the kid this: What you areshould never be the sole determinant of who you are. You have the right to yourown taste in music, your own choice of friends, your own self. These are yourprerogatives, no one else’s. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Someday, I hope my studentwill learn. That you have to honor what you belong to, yes. But you must alsoprotect the things that belong to you.

Copyright 2000 Miami Herald

2ndthoughts following N.Y. verdict

“....[A] wallet in thehand of a white man looks like a wallet, but a wallet in the hand of a blackman looks like a gun.’’

- Bill Bradley

I was ready to jump to conclusion.Then four black women got in the way.

Meaning the four who saton the Albany, N.Y., jury that last week acquitted four white cops in the shootingdeath of an unarmed African immigrant.

By now, you know the story.How New York City police officers encountered Amadou Diallo standing in frontof his apartment building early last year. How he went into his pocket for something.How somebody yelled, “Gun!’’

How they shot him. And thenshot him some more. Forty-one rounds fired over eight seconds, 19 of them findingtheir mark.

Then the awful discovery:the “gun’’ was only a wallet.

The thing seemed cut anddried to me. Which is why the jury’s verdict was ... impossible. Not guiltyof murder, not guilty of manslaughter, not even guilty of criminal negligence?Now New York City is steaming, the kettle of racial acrimony threatening toboil. And I’d be ready to boil right along with them, except ...

Except for the inconvenientfact of those four women.

I find myself caught between— not able to believe, not able to dismiss. And I’m forced to confess that theyare the only reason I’m willing to cut the justice system even that sliver ofslack.

It’s a painful admission.It’s also an unavoidable one. How many times has an encounter with a white lawmanresulted in the unjustifiable injury or death of an innocent African-Americanwoman or man? And how many times has an all-white jury justified it anyway?

So it makes a difference— it shouldn’t, but it does — that four of the jurors who vouched for the legalblamelessness of these cops are black. Granted, blackness is no more a characterreference than whiteness is a character defect. But you’re more willing to listen— a friend says she had to think twice — because of the race of those women.

It’s a sad truth that speaksvolumes about the reputation cops and courts have earned in minority communities.If trust is the currency of justice, then the justice system is bankrupt inthose neighborhoods.

Fact is, black folks knowa different system than their white countrymen do. Think Rodney King, smashedto pulp by Los Angeles police while the nation stood witness. An all-white juryset those officers free. And then there’s O.J. Simpson, whose defense team drewlaughter with the suggestion that Los Angeles cops might plant evidence or framesuspects. Over 20 L.A. cops have recently been fired or disciplined for plantingevidence and framing suspects.

Understand those thingsand you’ll understand why blacks have no trouble believing cops could willfullyexecute a man in the vestibule of his own building. Or why they would distrusta jury that said otherwise.

Here’s the question: IfAmadou Diallo was white, would he still be alive? Would some jittery cop havebeen so quick to see a gun where there was none? Would they have been so filledwith fear that they’d fire 41 times — 41 times! — to bring him down?

We cannot, of course, everknow for sure. And I’m not at all convinced the conclusion I was ready to jumpto is not in fact the correct one. Yet at the same time, I’m troubled by therealization that we as African-American people jump by reflex now. That experiencehas taught us this is the wise thing to do.

I feel sorry for those women,having to bear the weight of expectation. I don’t like having to trust morein the fact of blackness than in the promise of justice.

But that’s where we stand.And until courts and cops begin to work equally hard at earning the trust ofall citizens, it’s where we’re likely to stay.

Until that moment, theseepisodes will continue to move with sad predictability.

White cop shoots unarmedblack person. Outrage burns like fire.

And we jump.

Copyright 2000 Miami Herald

Reparations’weight still burdens soul of some black folks

“Don’t depend on thetrain from Washington. It’s 100 years overdue.’’

In January of 1865, as theCivil War was grinding to a close, Union Army Gen. William Tecumseh Shermanissued Special Field Order 15, awarding captured farmlands in South Carolina,Georgia and Florida to former slaves. Each freedman was to receive 40 acresand the loan of an Army mule. Four months later, President Andrew Johnson rescindedthe order and returned the land to the former slave owners.

But “40 acres and a mule’’fired the imagination of ex-slaves and their allies. Republican CongressmanThaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania unsuccessfully pushed legislation to give freedblacks this leg up on their new life. It was as inconceivable to him as it wasto them that millions of illiterate and impoverished people would be turnedloose in a hostile region without food, shelter or means.

Surely, they thought, therewould at least be 40 acres and a mule. Something to get a man started. So theywaited, filled with expectation and hope.

All of which adds a certainpoignancy to recent news stories of a reparations hoax targeting African Americansin South Florida and elsewhere in the South and upper Midwest. In one versionof the scam, old people are told to supply personal data so that the governmentcan pay them money under the fictional “Slave Reparation Act.’’ Another centerson a supposed $40,000 reparations rebate on 1999 taxes open to African Americanswho file an amended return with the IRS. The con artists offer to do the necessarypaperwork for a fee of up to $150. Dozens have fallen for it.

ARDUOUS WAIT

Small wonder. After all,these cons play on a point of emotional vulnerability. Meaning that, where compensationfor the long night of our American odyssey is concerned, many black folks arestill doing as our forebears did: waiting for compensation. Waiting for reparations.

It’s not that I disagreewith folks who argue that cause. From where I sit, their reasoning is unassailable.If it’s an accepted practice that governments pay restitution to citizens theyhave materially damaged, if it’s proper for Germany and Austria to compensateHolocaust victims and the United States to recompense Americans of Japaneseheritage interned during World War II, then what argument can be made againstreparations for blacks, who suffered 246 years of slavery and an additionalcentury of Jim Crow privation?

IMPRACTICAL

But for all that, reparationsis not an issue that resonates with me. It strikes me as a righteous but impracticalcrusade, a tilting at windmills that diverts time, attention and political capitalfrom more pressing matters.

Where reparations for AfricanAmericans are concerned, I consider two things unarguable. The first is thatthey can’t print enough money to compensate the crime. The second is that, evenif they could, reparations would still not happen because the mood of the countrywould not allow it. Inevitably, it would be seen as giving some unearned thingto black people. Never mind that we’ve never been “given’’ a damned thing; that’sstill how it would play.
I know white America is not some wicked monolith, any more than black Americais.

We could argue the point,I suppose. Win the debate on its merits and still never see a dime.

Or we could invest thattime and energy to improve the education of our children, reconnect our menwith their communities, dismantle discrimination in housing and labor, fightpolice profiling, rescue our boys from the maw of the criminal injustice system.Take our destiny in our own hands for a change.

I guess I’ve just growntired of black people asking white people to “do’’ things. Tired of black folks’contentment always being held hostage to white folks’ will.

Forgive me if I seem topaint with too broad a brush. I know white America is not some wicked monolith,any more than black America is. I believe in human fraternity.

But the belief does nothingto still that fatigue — marrow-deep and newly exacerbated by the thought ofscam artists preying upon this emotionally vulnerable spot.

We’ve been looking for thoseacres and that mule for 135 years. I guess I’m just tired of waiting.

Copyright 2000 Miami Herald

Gangstarap’s mask a rip-off

Oct. 26, 2000

“We wear the mask that grinsand lies’’

The great black VaudevillianBert Williams is supposed to have been a very funny guy. “The funniest man Iever saw,’’ W.C. Fields once said.

Offstage, Williams was reputedto be exceedingly intelligent and reserved to the point of snobbishness. Hewas a great reader, too, favoring the likes of Twain, Goethe, Kant and Voltaire.

Onstage was another matter.Every night before he went on, Williams put on his mask. That is, he appliedto his face gleaming black cork and whitewall tire lips. Then he shuffled outthere, a shiftless ne’er-do-well, slow of foot, slower of mouth and slowestof mind. He and his partner, George Walker, billed themselves as “Two Real Coons’’by way of assuring white audiences that they were getting something they werenot: authentic black comedy.

This was obligatory behaviorfor black performers a century ago.

I was reminded of Bert Williams’life as I watched Spike Lee’s movie. Bamboozled is easily the most controversialrelease of the season; a satire about the rise and fall of Mantan’s New MillenniumMinstrel Show, a TV variety show built on the coarsest racial stereotypes youcan imagine. Two shiftless clowns, grinning from blackface and red lips, performin a watermelon patch. Featured players include Aunt Jemima, Sambo and assortedpickaninnies. Mantan is the brainchild of a disgruntled black television executivewho only wants to get fired. Instead, he gets acclaimed. Mantan becomes a sensation.

It’s not a great movie —the final act is a mess, and the characters are sometimes unrecognizable ashuman beings. And yet Bamboozled is, at times, strangely compelling.

One scene in particular.You watch the characters played by Tommy Davidson and Savion Glover burn thecork black, mix it with water, then apply that paste to their faces. Watch themdraw lips with lipstick the color of firetrucks. Watch them disappear behindthe mask. Then they take the stage for the first time, these human caricaturesstraight out of a segregationist’s fever dream. There’s a moment of stunned,airless silence. White members of the studio audience turn hesitantly to blackones, looking for a cue, wordlessly asking if they should find this funny.

And, softly at first, theblack people laugh. That laugh stays with me. There’s something in it both troublingand true.

Because the better partof a century later, the “coon’’ act has changed and yet remains disturbinglythe same. Consider that some of us now sell a crude, violent, values-free musicthat’s supposed to be as definitively black as Bert Williams’ shuffling jive.

Consider, too, that we stillwear masks: A few years ago, there was a church-going ballet student who, seekingsuccess as a rapper, remade herself as a foul-mouthed, malt liquor-swillinghomegirl called Boss. Then there’s the guy who began his career wearing lipstickand rouge until that went out of fashion and he transformed himself into a crudestreet punk called Dr. Dre.

Some of us still wear themask that grins and lies. Only now they do it not because they have to, butbecause that’s where the money is. Because black kids — white ones, too — willpay good money for fake lessons in authentic blackness.

“Keepin’ it real,’’ theysay. And it’s hard not to hear a ghostly echo of Williams and Walker: “Two realcoons.’’

I’m not mad at Bert Williams.Not mad at Mantan Moreland, Butterfly McQueen, Nick Stewart, Stepin Fetchitor any other black performer who had to shuffle his feet, bug his eyes, slurhis words, or wear blackface because the white men who did the hiring wouldnot accept them otherwise.

But I am mad at gangstarap. And at those of us who passively accept the insult. Have we, African Americans,become so numb, dumb, despairing or disconnected that we’ve forgotten who weare? Forgotten how to give a damn?

Or have we just worn themask so long we’ve forgotten the face that lies beneath? Forgotten everythingexcept the rictus grin of the clown. And betrayed ancestors’ sacrifice in theprocess.

Because there’s only onedifference between Bert Williams and Dr. Dre.

Bert Williams had no choice.

Copyright 2000 Miami Herald